Maya POV
The wolf's bones cracked and popped like breaking pencils.
I watched, frozen in horror, as its massive body rippled and twisted. Fur melted into skin. Paws stretched into hands. The muzzle shortened, flattened, became a human face with a strong jaw and scars cutting across one cheek like lightning bolts.
In less than five seconds, the wolf was gone.
A man knelt where it had been. A very tall, very muscular, very naked man with silver hair and eyes the color of a frozen lake.
My scream finally found its voice.
"Stay BACK!" I scrambled backward on my hands, my palms scraping against rough stone. My heart hammered so hard I thought it might explode. "What are you? What's happening?"
The other animals shifted too. The sound was nightmare fuel—bones snapping, bodies reforming, growls turning into gasps. The panther became a lean man with dark skin and strange cloudy eyes that didn't quite focus on anything. The tiger transformed into someone younger, wild-eyed, with orange-striped hair that shouldn't exist in nature. The fox became a shorter man with clever features and a smile that looked too sharp to be friendly.
They were all staring at me like I'd grown a second head.
"She doesn't know about shifting?" the fox-man whispered, his voice smooth as honey. "How is that possible?"
"Where did she come from?" The panther-man tilted his head, those unseeing eyes aimed in my direction. "I smell no tribe marks on her. No mate bonds. Nothing but—" He inhaled deeply. "Moonflower and something else. Something I've never smelled before."
"She's unclaimed," the silver-haired wolf-man said. His voice was deep and rough, like gravel grinding together. "Completely unclaimed."
They all took a step closer.
I pressed my back against a rock wall, mind racing through possibilities. Hallucination from dying? Brain damage from the building collapse? Some weird afterlife where heaven had really bad interior decorators and absolutely no concept of personal space?
"I said STAY BACK!" I grabbed the nearest thing I could find—a fist-sized rock—and held it up like a weapon. My hand shook but my voice didn't. Twelve years in emergency rooms taught you how to project authority even when you were terrified. "I don't know what kind of weird cult this is, but I'm not interested. Just point me toward the nearest police station and we'll forget this ever happened."
The fox-man laughed. Actually laughed. "Police station? What's that?"
"Are you serious right now?" I looked around properly for the first time. We were in some kind of canyon with red rock walls rising up on all sides. No buildings. No roads. No cell phone towers. Just rocks, scraggly dead plants, and a stream trickling through the middle. The sky was wrong too—two suns hung overhead, one yellow and one pale orange.
Two suns.
My rock slipped from numb fingers. "Where am I?"
"The Wastelands," the wolf-man said. "The cursed lands where no tribe will settle. Where males come to die or disappear." He moved closer, and I noticed the scars covering his body—long claw marks across his ribs, a chunk missing from his left shoulder, evidence of violence everywhere. "I'm Kael. These are my pack brothers. We won't hurt you."
"You're all naked," I said stupidly. Because apparently that's what my brain decided was the most important detail in this absolute nightmare scenario.
The striped-hair tiger-man grunted. He hadn't spoken yet, just watched me with eyes that were more animal than human.
"Clothes tear when we shift," the panther-man explained, his voice surprisingly gentle. "I'm Oryn. The quiet one is Thorne. The smirking fool is Soren."
"Charmed," Soren said, not looking remotely sorry about the whole naked situation.
I closed my eyes, counted to ten, and tried to think like a doctor instead of a panicking human. Assess the situation. Gather information. Form a diagnosis.
"Okay," I said slowly. "Let's say I believe you. Let's say this isn't a hallucination and I'm actually in some kind of alternate dimension with shapeshifting men and two suns. Why are you all looking at me like I'm the weird one?"
"Because you're female," Kael said, like this explained everything.
"So?"
They all exchanged glances.
"There's only one female born for every hundred males," Oryn said carefully. "Females are precious. Sacred. Tribes go to war over them. And you—" He gestured at me. "You appeared out of nowhere in the Wastelands, unclaimed and unprotected. This shouldn't be possible."
The pieces clicked together in my head, and I really didn't like the picture they made. "So what you're saying is, I'm in a world where women are rare and you're four guys who just found one alone?"
Kael raised his hands in a peaceful gesture. "We're exiles. Cast out from our tribes for various crimes. We have no tribe to claim you for, no alpha to demand you be brought back. You're safe with us."
"That is literally the least reassuring thing you could have said."
Soren laughed again. "I like her. She's got fire."
"She's also terrified," Oryn said quietly. "Her heartbeat sounds like a hummingbird's wings. She's trying to be brave but she thinks we're going to hurt her."
How did he—oh. The blind eyes. He was listening to my heartbeat. Great. Privacy was apparently not a thing here.
I forced my breathing to slow, my hands to stop shaking. If this was real—and the longer I stood here the more real it felt—then I needed information. I needed to understand the rules of this world before I could figure out how to survive it.
"I'm Maya," I said. "Dr. Maya Reeves. I'm from—" How did you explain Earth to people who probably didn't know it existed? "Somewhere very far away. I died saving a child and woke up here. I don't know how or why."
"The Earth Mother sent you," Kael said with absolute certainty. "She must have. Nothing else explains it."
"Or maybe the universe has a really twisted sense of humor," I muttered.
Thorne, the tiger-man who hadn't spoken, suddenly moved. Fast. He crossed the space between us in two strides and grabbed my wrist before I could react. His grip was gentle but firm, and he pulled my hand to his face, inhaling deeply at my pulse point.
"Hey! Personal space!"
He ignored me. His eyes, golden and strange, locked onto mine. When he finally spoke, his voice was rough like he didn't use it much. "Smells like home. Like safety. Like—" He struggled for words. "Like the thing I've been searching for."
A chill ran down my spine that had nothing to do with fear.
"Thorne," Kael said warningly. "Let her go. You're scaring her."
But Thorne didn't let go. His pupils dilated until his eyes were almost entirely black, and he leaned closer, breathing me in like I was the most important thing in the world.
"Mine," he growled.
The other three men went very, very still.
"Oh no," Soren whispered. "He's scent-bonding. That's not supposed to happen without—"
The ground beneath us suddenly shook. Not an earthquake. Something worse. The stream's water rippled with the impact of massive footsteps approaching. From beyond the canyon walls came a roar that made my bones vibrate.
All four men shifted instantly back into their animal forms, positioning themselves between me and whatever was coming.
Over the canyon rim appeared the biggest bear I'd ever seen. No—not a bear. A bear-man, still in animal form, easily twice the size of Kael's wolf. And behind it, at least twenty more massive shapes appeared, circling the canyon's edge.
We were surrounded.
Kael shifted back just his head—a disturbing partial transformation. "Stone Tribe," he snarled. "We're in their hunting territory. They must have scented the female."
"What do they want?" I asked, though I had a horrible feeling I already knew.
The giant bear shifted. A woman stood there—older, powerful, with gray streaks in her dark hair and eyes like chips of flint. She smiled, and it was the scariest thing I'd seen yet.
"Well, well," she said, her voice carrying across the canyon. "The Earth Mother delivers a gift to my doorstep. That female is coming with us, exiles. Hand her over, or we'll take her over your corpses."
Kael's wolf form growled, savage and protective.
The woman's smile widened. "Choose quickly. My patience is thin, and my son needs a mate."